Instrumentalism

1. The same knife cuts bread and wounds, the same fire warms and destroys. An instrument takes its meaning from the hand that holds it and the end that hand pursues. Technology is no exception to this rule.
2. The feed you were scrolling tonight, another uses to learn a language, keep in touch with loved ones, organize mutual help. It is not the object that has changed, it is the intention and the measure brought to it.
3. To pin the blame on the device has something convenient about it: it is to call oneself driven when one has merely given in. Yet to acknowledge myself free in my use is also to give myself the power to change it, and to turn my effort toward what depends on me.

Therefore So to place the remedy on the side of use is not naivety: it is to refuse to surrender myself to an object, and to keep my grip on what is truly mine.

1. Grant that the use depends on you. But is that use decided on equal terms? On one side, your will of an evening, tired, distracted. On the other, thousands of engineers whose job is to catch it off guard.
2. The feed is tested, measured, tuned on millions of people to find what keeps you there: unpredictable reward, borderless scrolling, flattering numbers. This is the attention economy: your viewing time is the commodity, and everything is set to extract more of it.
3. To say then « one need only use it well » is to expect your will alone to prevail over vast means, studied and ceaselessly adjusted to catch it out. The freedom of use remains, but it does not carry the weight ascribed to it.

Therefore So to refer the problem to use alone is to burden the individual with a contest that the object, for its part, did not fight fairly.

1. To say « everything depends on the use » assumes the tool is an indifferent means, equally available for better or worse. That is true of a hammer, which lies in the drawer asking nothing of you.
2. But the feed does not wait in the drawer: endless scrolling, notifications, unpredictable rewards, everything in it is calculated to keep you there. It is not a neutral means you pick up, it is a device that solicits, steers, and makes one behaviour easier than the rest.
3. An object imposes nothing, granted, but it disposes. The slide invites you to slide down, the bench to sit, the feed to keep scrolling. To believe use entirely free is to forget that the very form of the tool has already steered behaviour before one uses it.

Therefore So « it's not the tool, it's the use » is too quick: the line between tool and use is precisely what the object is built to move.